We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

xyzsparetimexyz

China seems to do a decent job of it. Why can't we?

nilirl

I've been thinking about this too: why aren't we able to run safe political experiments? We're missing guardrails to allow safe experimentation and we're missing institutions to provide affordances. I think the difficult bit is figuring out how to seperate the goodness of centralized decision shaping and the badness of centralized power accumulation.

xg15

This thread from yesterday feels relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48746445

FrankWilhoit

"Society" (i.e. northern European and Anglophone) doesn't want to be improved.

adrianmsmith

The article gives examples of situations where projects have failed, and states a solution. > The [solution] is to organize the work into the smallest possible learnable chunks and continuously alternate between doing and learning. It would be more convincing if the article gave examples of where that solution had been tried and succeeded. I mean this must have been tried somewhere, surely.

acid_fish

In general we don't have a good system design thinking around politics and organizing society.

Devasta

I think back to the first covid lockdowns. All of society was reorganized in a matter of weeks! Oil is worth negative money if they don't make us consume it! Work from home became mainstream, it turns out all those people with anxiety disorders or pain management issues could in fact participate in society! Generous payments were made for people who couldn't work, with no concern about who will pay for it! The harsh reality is that all governments could solve most problems easily, they just couldn't be bothered.

PaulKeeble

Governments do run experiments sometimes, quite a lot of experiments on UBI have been run for example and we have good knowledge on whether its introduction would improve society. But I don't feel like leadership particularly cares about evidence and the right thing, they are far more idealogical than that and tend to gravitate towards policy based evidence from thinktanks and other powerful sources that produce bad science but the results they want to see. The populace doesn't have much in the way of alternative choices for politicians that would follow the results of actual experiments nor fund them, its not really an option being offered, I think partly because its a tough sell compared to "we will do X". "We will test a variety of options and then do the best" requires more trust and its a low trust environment.

14113

The fundamental issue with this is that many problems have a time/energy/financial threshold for success. Trying to tackle such a problem with incremental iterative solutions will consistently fail, as each individual iteration will fail. This is most obvious when network effects are present (e.g. local immunisation efforts vs country-wide immunisation), but it's surprisingly common in other government-related areas like welfare, childcare, social security etc. Edit: Another comment has reminded me that affordable public transport is the perfect example of this: Incrementally building out a public transport system will almost always fail, as the initial lines (be they buses, light rail, etc) will typically not be successful enough to justify the cost of building the line. If, instead, a system is built out universally and simultaneously, the utility (and thus income) of each line increases due to the interconnected nature of the network.

injidup

It doesn't work because politicians are not allowed to admit failure. A politician who admits that they tried something, no matter how small, and it didn't work, is fish food. This means there is no difference in downside, for the politician, between going all in on a big decision with huge risk versus taking baby steps. The politician is dead no matter what. They either keep claiming the bad decision was a good one in the hope that something turns up, or eventually resign or get voted out. But if they ever dare to publicly change their point of view in the presence of new evidence, they are accused of the worst crime a politician can commit. They are a "flip-flopper."

retired

This is why I left The Netherlands. They have been working on laws for both self employment and unrealized capital gains for the past ten years and in the meanwhile have implemented some unworkable “temporary laws”. Just implement good laws, do it right once. Yes it will hurt to not have a smooth transition but it’s better than having meetings about it for ten years.

Bratmon

It's weird that this article doesn't even attempt to grapple with the reason why governments can't run big policies as experiments and cancel them if they fail: Every time the government hires a group of people to do X, that automatically creates a class of people who: 1. Depend on the government continuing to do X for their livelihoods 2. Are experts in X and know far more about it than any government official This creates an automatic constituency that will fight tooth and nail to keep X going no matter what. And step one of that fighting will be to make sure that the official report answering the original research question "Did X work?" will never be a clear "No." And God help any politician that ignores the official report and cancels X anyway. Now the problem that X was intended to solve is entirely their fault, and there's an army of X experts running to every media outlet in the country making sure the general public knows it!

deepsummer

The thing is, there is no hive mind called "society". Everybody works in their own interest. Always, and in every "society". Individual workers work on failing initiatives as long as they get paid. The outcome of the initiative may be bad for "society". But was it good for the individuals working on it? Maybe they got paid well. Maybe they enjoyed the work? Maybe the work was easy because they knew that it would fail anyway, so they didn't have to put much effort into it? Maybe it was also good for the management or politicians? Maybe it was a step up in their career. And maybe, if they could jump ship before the failure became obvious, they could climb up the ladder to get to an even better position? You can always blame your successors for ruining the project. And maybe it was good for whoever ordered it? If it's a local project, maybe they got subsidies from federal government bodies, and they don't even care whether it succeeds, as long as it created employment and the illusion of progress? Or if it's a private project, maybe they just tried a moon shot that, if it fails, was useful as a tax write-off? In real life, there are so many layers to a 'failed' project. It can be a failure for some and a success for others. And those for whom it is a success will defend it, maybe even deceive to keep it running.

danbruc

1. An airplane crashes, everyone dies. Clearly a bad thing. Not so quick. For the funeral industry this means additional business, a good thing. And this is true for a LOT [1] of things, they are not good or bad, right or wrong, their judgment depends on perspective and personal preferences. 2. Which means that there is generally no policy that makes everyone happy. So you need a party with a program that aims at finding compromises that are acceptable for everyone. 3. But nobody will vote for such a party. Why would you vote for a party that gives you 50 % of what you want if there is a different party that is more aligned with your views and preferences and promises to give you 90 % of what you want? 4. In consequence the political direction tends to hop between extremes instead of settling on compromises. One group gets really unhappy with the current situation, shows up for elections, votes their party into power, moves the situation into the direction of a different extreme, until others get unhappy enough to start the process all over again. 5. Even in political systems where [sometimes] a coalition of parties exercises the power and they are forced to compromise, the outcome is all but ideal. Things move slowly because finding compromises is hard if you do not really want to compromise. Voters look down on the party they voted for because they are not delivering what they promised but only compromises. I guess the moral of the story is that the voters have to realize that their view is not the only valid one and that voting for compromises would probably yield better outcomes than voting for extremes and either going in that direction for some time until turning around or maybe arriving at a forced compromise that no one voted for. [1] Exercise for the reader, find something politically relevant that does not depend on perspective and personal preferences.

FinnLobsien

I agree with the problem, and I think it stems from a few core issues: 1. Societies are heterogenous, and some groups are always benefitting from the status quo, which will then rebel against any potential changes. For instance, in Germany (and multiple other European countries), forming a GmbH (LLC) requires in-person sessions with expensive notaries, who will read the entire paperwork out loud. This made sense when it was invented in 1892 because company formation was extremely rare, always required large facilities and upfront purchases, etc. Today, this requirement only benefits notaries, as I reckon extremely few people would voluntarily hire a notary to form their company. But of course notaries would be against making their services legally required! And of course, if anyone suggests loosening requirements, they will spell out all of the terrible fraud that would happen if company formation didn't require a thorough legal review. That's an example for something relatively obvious. It gets much harder with genuinely complex topics (pensions? tax reform? healthcare?). 2. Many initiatives to improve society fail because they're viewed through a prism of administration/policy, not the actual people impacted. Take modern urbanism, which cleanly separates where people live (residential areas), where they work (commercial districts), where they shop (malls), and where they spend their free time (recreational centers, etc.) This beautifully serves people who plan and administer because it makes their work massively easier vs. a tangle of apartment buildings with a coffee shop and clothing boutique on the ground floor and a playground for the kids in front. It checks the boxes of daily life, but the people living through it feel alienated from their community with these single-purpose urban areas. 3. We have a bias towards actionism. We tend to think that big, complicated problems need big, complicated solutions, and politicians (who are evaluated on perception, not results) need to be seen designing and implementing those big, complicated solutions. Massive amounts of infant mortality were prevented by simply making doctors wash their hands, and Semmelweis (who came up with the hypothesis) was so ridiculed for that idea that he died in an insane asylum. It's sadly often unacceptable to say "we're going to make a little tweak that'll have a ton of downstream effects and solve this massive problem in 5 years".

Herring

Try discussing this issue with a LLM. I'm getting some pretty good responses from Gemini pro. Just as a first pass. It can help you avoid major errors.

shalmanese

The purpose of a system is what it does. You're never going to have success optimizing a system towards goals that are not the goals of the system. You need to first assess what the system is optimizing towards in the first place and now to change the incentives, otherwise you're going to misdiagnose competence as incompetence.